Labella is vice mayor

Cebu City Councilor Edgar Labella stayed in the prayer room of the Metropolitan Cathedral Cathedral all afternoon to wait out the tense lull of canvassing.

A phone call from Mayor-elect Michael Rama broke the good news.

At 10:10 p.m. in the presence of Labella’s family and cheering supporters in the social hall of the Legislative Building, Labella was proclaimed the duly elected vice mayor of Cebu City.

He won by a margin of 184 votes against Vice Mayor Joy Augustus Young of the Bando Osmena-Pundok Kauswagan (BO-PK)

The vote count was closedly watched for four days following Monday’s election, a delay caused by damaged memory cards affecting the transmission of election returns in three precincts.

When the finally tally for vice mayor was flashed on the wide screen, Team Rama supporters burst into loud applause and cheers.

The City Board of Canvassers also proclaimed the last three slots for the City Council – reelectionist Councilor Noel Wenceslao of BO–PK for the 8th slot in the north district, new councilor Hans Abella of Team Rama placed 7th in the south district while reelectionist  Ritchie Osmena of BO-PK won the 8th slot.

Labella, a lawyer and former director of the Office of the Ombudsman of the Visayas, will preside over legislative sessions of the City Council as part of his duties as no. 2 city official.

His proclamation was slightly delayed because the Precinct Count Optical (PCOS) machine assigned to Cambinocot failed to transmit election results which had to be manually fed into the Canvass Consolidated System (CCS).

City election officer Ferdinand Gujilde asked the chairman of the Cambinocot Board of Election Inspectors (BEI) to retrieve the compact flash memory (CF) card from the PCOS machine and manually transfer it to the CCS machine.

The final tally showed Labella won by 184 votes against Young (not 174 as announced earlier).

Labella got a total of 203,267 votes as against the 203, 083 votes of Young.

Mayor Rama rejoiced over the results, waving aside questions for now about what would be the next steps for him and Labella.

“Ang importante karon nga daug mi,” he said.

(What is important now is that we won.)

Canvassing was suspended Tuesday night because of defective compact flash (CF) memory cards from clustered precincts in barangays Luz, Cambinocot and Mambaling. Labella was then leading by only 371 votes. Each barangay precinct had almost 1,000 voters.

Replacement memory cards from Manila arrived before noon. Poll clerks had to refeed ballots from the three precincts into their respective PCOS machines using the new CF cards.

Only the BEI and watchers from BOPK and Team Rama were allowed inside the social hall to witness this.

Refeeding of ballots was completed by 6:15 p.m. Canvassing of returns from Mambaling reduced Labella’s lead to 329 and later to 298 when Luz returns were completed.

At 8:40 p.m, Gujilde ordered the doors of the social hall closed as supporters started to become unruly. After refeeding of ballots from Cambinocot, Labella won by 184 votes.

Spectators started shouting “daug na” [we won] and “Team Rama.” Cheers and applause grew louder as Labella entered the social hall.

Rama who was there since 8 p.m. to monitor the canvass hugged Labella and raised his hand in victory, causing cheers to grow louder.

Gujilde asked the crowd to calm down because the Cambinocot BEIs had difficulty working.

The PCOS was moved to the middle of the room for a better signal but when the signal still faltered, the Cambinocot BEI was directed to manually retrieve the CF memory card from the PCOS machine and turn this over to the CCS operator for consolidation with the rest of the election tally.